How emerging technologies can meet the on-demand expectations of learners

Your employees are accustomed to typing or speaking a query into their devices and finding exactly what they need in seconds. On-demand access is now the default, and that means organizations must provide tools that give learners what they need, when they need it.

In this presentation from the Learning Technologies 2018 conference,
O’Reilly’s Karen Hebert-Maccaro and Andrew Odewahn look at how emerging technologies and on-demand learning are meeting the expectations of modern learners and keeping organizations competitive.

Highlights from the talk

The average shelf life for a skillset is 3-4 years and the average person will have 11 jobs during their working life. Many of these jobs will cross into different areas, which requires reskilling or upskilling. (02:13)

Modern businesses must continually reinvent themselves to stay competitive. To remain viable, organizations either need to replace their workforces every few years—an unrealistic solution—or they must invest in learning so employees can take on new roles. (03:56)

The days of laboriously searching through reference material or hunting for resources on learning management systems have given way to on-demand learning. A learner can plug a query into Google or YouTube and immediately find what they need. The learning tools organizations provide to their employees must address this on-demand expectation. (05:15)

Should learning and development (L&D) departments offer traditional classroom learning? E-learning? On-demand learning? The answer is “all of the above.” L&D groups need to be architects of robust learning ecosystems. (06:11)

The talk includes demonstrations of two learning tools that harness emerging technologies:

A Jupyter notebook is an open source tool that weaves together code, narrative text, images, and interactive widgets into a single active-learning experience. At O’Reilly, we’re applying Jupyter notebooks in synchronous and asynchronous learning environments. (12:03)

Voice-activated tools, such as those offered by Amazon Alexa, can give learners on-demand access to information within the flow of a learning experience. (18:29)

Karen Hebert-Maccaro is presently Chief Content Officer of O’Reilly Media, Inc. where she is a key member of the executive management team, responsible for leading and managing the organization’s content and learning strategy. In this capacity she oversees the development of learning initiatives and programs for Safari, O'Reilly's learning and training platform, manages both creation and curation of available content, and directs the internal editorial teams in acquisition, development, and delivery of content and products for learning, tra...

Andrew Odewahn is the CTO of O'Reilly Media and the co-chair of JupyterCon. He's into developer education, open source books, Jupyter, Docker, Go, React, and just generally lowering the barriers to entry on technology.